As the number of possible communication modalities between contactors and contactees has increased, it has become increasingly valuable to identify and choose optimal channel(s) by which communications are carried out to facilitate maximizing the utility of a data communication. For example, communicating parties may be able to communicate by computer (e.g., email, voice over IP, collaborative editing), by telephone (e.g., POTS, cell phone, satellite phone), face to face (e.g., personal meeting, video conference) and/or other methods, with such communication employing one or more channels (e.g., phone and collaborative editing). Maximizing the utility or expected utility of such communications may depend on the identity of the parties, the type of communication equipment available to the parties, the type of equipment used to do the initial signaling, the location of the parties and in what activities, if any, the parties are engaged or are likely to be engaged in the future.
By way of illustration, a first contactee may be employing a first tool and be intensely focused on an important task and thus may not desire to be interrupted via real-time communications except from select people whose desired communication concerns the important task. But a second contactee may be employing no tools and be lightly focused on an unimportant task and thus may not mind being interrupted via real-time communications from colleagues concerning a variety of topics. Conventionally, the contactor had limited means, if any, to determine which, if any, communication method(s) would be best employed to communicate with a contactee (e.g., contacting the contactee's secretary to figure out how and when to contact the contactee). Similarly, the contactee had limited contact control methods (e.g., leaving the phone off the hook, ignoring emails, disabling an email application, leaving instructions with a secretary). Thus, the preferences and needs of the contactees and contactors may not have been observed.
Beyond considerations of real-time methods versus methods that allow users to send potentially disruptive real-time disruptions into an asynchronous (store and forward) communication format (e.g., voicemail, email), a contactee may have preferences, depending on the contactor and the context at hand, for a particular modality. For example, a contactee may prefer to receive an instant message on an important document while working on that document to facilitate cutting and pasting from the instant message, rather than receiving a real-time phone call that would require transcribing the caller's comments. Again, conventionally the contactee had limited means, if any, to have such preferences observed (e.g., a well-trained secretary, considerate colleagues) which often lead to unfulfilled preferences and unwanted interruptions.
While conventional communications between two communicating parties was complicated, identifying and scheduling communications that optimized the utility of a communication between multiple parties (e.g., group meeting, group teleconference) was even more complicated, with the identification, scheduling, and initiating often consuming more time and resources than the actual communication. Such scheduling and initiating problems were exacerbated when the schedulers and initializers did not have complete information concerning the parties.